HAPPILY: A Personal History With Fairy Tales with Sabrina Orah Mark (Virtual)

Based on her acclaimed Paris Review column “Happily,” Sabrina Orah Mark will discuss her new memoir-in-essays which reimagines the modern fairy tale, turning it inside out and searching it for the wisdom to better understand our contemporary moment. She grapples with a loss of innocence of her son in “Sorry, Peter Pan, We’re Over You;” an unlikely communion with wicked wives and the roots of their bad reputation in “The Evil Stepmother;” and the hunt for a wigmaker in a time of unprecedented civil unrest in “Rapunzel, Draft One Thousand.” Set against the backdrop of our current age of upheaval, Mark locates the magic in the mundane and illuminates the surreality of life as we know it today. The author will be joined in conversation with Charter Oak Cultural Center’s Executive Director Rabbi Donna Berman, PhD.

Virtual: $5 non-members and members. REGISTER HERE. 

 Copies of Happily are available for purchase through the Mark Twain Store; proceeds benefit The Mark Twain House & Museum. Books will be shipped after the event. We regret that we are NOT able to ship books outside the United States as it is cost-prohibitive to do so. 

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About the Author: 

Sabrina Orah Mark is an award-winning fiction writer and poet, who has written the column “Happily” for The Paris Review since 2018. Raised in Brooklyn, NY, Mark earned a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University. She also earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD in English from the University of Georgia. She is the author of the poetry collections Tsim Tsum, and The Babies (winner of the Saturnalia Book Prize). Her collection of stories, Wild Milk, won the Georgia Author of the Year Award for Short Story and was a finalist for the Townsend Prize for Fiction. Mark’s accomplishments include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center, and a Creative Capital Award. She lives in Athens, Georgia, with her husband, Reginald McKnight, and their two sons. 

About the Moderator: 

Rabbi Donna Berman is the executive director of the Charter Oak Cultural Center. Donna is known as one of the region’s most moving speakers and visionary leaders. She has touched thousands of lives through her work at the Charter Oak. Rabbi Donna holds a Ph.D. in Religion and Social Ethics from Drew University. At the core of her theology is a commitment to the Jewish tradition of tikkun olam, repairing the world through acts of justice. This is a commitment that she brings to her work at Charter Oak. 

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Programs at The Mark Twain House & Museum are made possible in part by support from CT Humanities; the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development, Office of the Arts; Ensworth Charitable Foundation, Bank of America, N.A., Trustee; the Greater Hartford Arts Council’s United Arts Campaign; The Hartford; The Mark Twain Foundation; The National Endowment for the Humanities; and Travelers.